Russell Banks

Russell Bank‘s latest novel, The Reserve, will be published on Jan. 29, 2008. The new novel is set in the Adirondacks, just like the author, who lives in Keene. Banks has some local appearances scheduled.

At 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2., he will be at the Border’s Books and Music at 395 Broadway in Saratoga Springs.

At 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, he will be giving a seminar as part of the New York State Writers Institute at the Heffner Alumni House, 1301 Peoples Avenue, Rensselaer (RPI), Troy

At 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, he will give a reading (and there will be the McKinney Award Ceremony) at the Darrin Communication Center 308, Rensselear (RPI)

About the author
Russell Banks, the author of eleven novels and five short story collections, recently served as New York State Author (2004–7). He has been called, “…a writer we, as readers and writers, can actually learn from, whose books help and urge us to change” (Fred Pfeil, Voice Literary Supplement). His newest novel, The Reserve, is set in the Adirondacks in 1936-37, at the height of the Great Depression. Winner of numerous awards, Banks is a leading voice of working class experience in modern letters. He is a past recipient of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the O. Henry Memorial Award. He received the American Book Award for The Book of Jamaica (1980). His novels, Continental Drift (1986), and Cloudsplitter (1998), were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two other novels, Affliction (1990) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991) were adapted as major motion pictures. His recent novel, The Darling (2004), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

About the novel
Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks’s sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules.

Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents’ country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa’s callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake. . . .

Jordan’s reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele. But for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa’s beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father’s unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.

Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author’s extraordinary repertoire.

One Response

I cannot wait to read this one; in fact I wrote a news item for it for a book review website I am involved with.
I love Russell Banks’ other works, and I spend a lot of time on the upper part of Lake George; this is one Novel I will be reading…